300 THE HUMAN FORM. 



ginning of all progress, and the arms, of all secondary creations 

 or arts. But from the extreme of nature — from the boundaries of 

 death, there is something to come that nature can never bestow, and 

 that something is sensation — the vital hoop which girdles the body, 

 and separates it for a season from the universe. Hence at the outer 

 gate of nature life again breaks forth in joyful resurrection; unab- 

 sorbed, unextinguished, the Maker is not exhausted, but is greater 

 for his work. For the soul running downwards from the brain to 

 the skin, never ending in the end begins anew, and reattaches death 

 to life by the standing wonder of the fivefold senses. So where the 

 formative soul ends, the conscious soul or the man begins — viz., 

 with the senses, as the basis, clothing and incentive of the will and 

 understanding. And as the soul descended, the senses reascend, the 

 same grand staircase of kingdoms. Touch, taste and smell are the 

 living mineral, vegetable and animal; and hearing is a new-born 

 palace of the air, whose shakes are music, and its winds are speech. 

 And the eye, round like the world, and rolling on its axis, communes 

 afresh with the whole possessions of light, and sees all from the sun 

 to the landscape in the gloss of that glory which is an image of the 

 truth. 



We now come directly to the human form, the stature of our souls, 

 and the vessel of our lives; and here we quit the anatomical, and 

 enter upon the integral sciences; nay, we also quit the body, so far 

 as it is material, and additional to the form. 



The human form is the image of God; for "God made man in 

 his own image, in the image of God created He him," and man is 

 a living human form. And the Creator Himself, as the archetype 

 of the creature, is a divine man, or a divinely human form. Ac- 

 cordingly God's revealed faces are such as man apprehends by his 

 own mind and likeness; as it is said, the Maker of all is "King of 

 kings, and Lord of lords j" and again in the new covenant, God is 

 "our Father in the heavens." And this way of speaking, accom- 

 modated to our nature, involves no compromise, but the divine truth 

 that man, the image of God, can know God by his constitution. 



The Word, in which God comes to man, or makes human revela- 

 tion of himself, reveals man to his real body, or shows the manhood 



